We all know that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a massive economic loss and killed more than 15 million people since it emerged in 2019. However, we still don’t know how many years have been lost due to disability and death, and how much the true cost of the pandemic is. Although it is very challenging to determine the cost of the pandemic and not easy to tally all the effects of various health burdens, early data suggest that the impact is significant and varies by country.
DALY, a unit to estimate the burden of a disease known as ‘Disability-Adjusted Life Years’, is the keystone to studying the burden of disease. Because of the global prevalence of COVID-19 among countries with different public health infrastructures; the way it is diagnosed and the way the data gets covered and reported to national health authorities varies a lot. Even the burden estimated through the data from agencies like the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Bank Group varied in hands of different research groups. Despite these variations, results on the health lost to COVID-19 are trickling in and the impact of COVID-19 has been enormous worldwide according to nature.com.